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Nintendo Fan Cases (2015–2026)

Nintendo enforces harder than most, and often after release rather than before. The pattern across its cases: asset reuse gets a clean claim, and anything an official remake is about to cover becomes a target.

Another Metroid 2 Remake (AM2R) — 2016​

A free PC remake of Metroid II by Milton Guasti (DoctorM64).

  • Released 2016-08-06 after years of development.
  • 2016-08-07: Nintendo DMCA'd the download hosts.
  • 2016-09-02: a direct DMCA notice reached Guasti's email; development ended.
  • Nintendo shipped its own Metroid: Samus Returns in 2017.
  • In September 2016 Nintendo DMCA'd 562 fan games from Game Jolt.

Pokémon Uranium — 2016​

A nine-year fan game, released August 2016, with 1.5M+ downloads in days.

  • Nintendo's lawyers sent takedown notices to the hosting sites, not directly to the developers.
  • The creators pre-emptively pulled their own download links "out of respect" and received no C&D directly.

Super Mario 64 HD — 2015​

A Unity remake of the Bob-omb Battlefield by Royston Ross, playable in-browser.

  • Taken down at Nintendo's request roughly a week after it drew attention.

Contrast: Ocarina of Time UE remake (CryZENx) — self-cancelled, no letter​

YouTuber CryZENx built an Unreal Engine remake of Ocarina of Time since 2016 (UE4, later UE5) and drew no enforcement for a decade. After Nintendo announced an official Ocarina of Time remake for Switch 2 (June 2026), CryZENx stopped the project himself — "better to just stop the project for now or I would [have] been disappeared… because of Nintendo ninjas." No C&D was sent; the old demos remain downloadable.

This is the tell: enforcement often is not needed. When a publisher announces an official version, the fan project either stops itself or gets stopped — and the announcement alone is enough.

Sources: IGN, Polygon, Ars Technica, Nintendo Life, Eurogamer, WIRED, GameSpot, dsogaming, Gaming.net, Wikipedia (AM2R, Pokémon Uranium).